The Gospel of St. Mark

Schmidt Number: S-2626

On-line since: 28th October, 2008

LECTURE 1

It is well
known that the Gospel of St. Mark begins with the words:
“This is the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ.”

A man of
today who seeks to comprehend this Gospel of St. Mark is at
once, in the very first words, faced with three riddles. The
first is to be found in the words: “This is the
beginning.” The beginning of what? How can this
beginning be understood? The second is: “the beginning
of the Gospel ...” In an anthroposophical sense, what
does the word “Gospel” mean? The third riddle we
have often spoken of: the figure of Christ Jesus Himself.

Whoever is
seriously seeking for knowledge and a deepening of himself
must recognize that mankind is evolving and progressing. For
this reason what we may call the understanding of any
revelation is not fixed once and for all, or confined to any
particular epoch. It progresses, so that anyone who attaches
a serious meaning to the terms “evolution” and
“progress” must necessarily believe that as time
goes on, mankind's deepest problems will be ever better, and
more thoroughly and profoundly, understood. For something
like the Gospel of St. Mark, as we shall demonstrate by means
of these three riddles, a certain turning point in our
comprehension has been reached only at the present time.
Slowly and gradually, but distinctly, there has been prepared
what can now lead us to a real understanding of the Gospel
and enable us to understand that “the Gospel
begins.” Why is this the case?

We need only
glance back a little to what filled human minds a
comparatively short time ago and we shall see how the very
nature of comprehension may, indeed must, have altered in
relation to a subject like this. If we go back further than
the nineteenth century, we shall find that in the eighteenth
and seventeenth centuries we approach ever closer to a time
when those persons whose spiritual life was at all concerned
with the Gospels had to start from a very different basis of
comprehension than that of the man of today. What could an
ordinary man of the eighteenth century say to himself if he
wished to place himself in the general line of the evolution
of humanity, and was not one of the few who were connected in
some way with an initiation or some occult revelation —
assuming that he had assimilated within himself everything
offered by external exoteric life? Even the most cultivated
man, one who stood on the highest pinnacle of the culture of
his age, could not look back on more than three thousand
years of the life of mankind; and one thousand of those years
was before the Christian era and nearly lost in misty
dimness. The other two thousand years since the founding of
Christianity were not yet quite completed. He might look back
three thousand years, shall we say? When one looked back at
the earliest of these millennia one was confronted with a
completely mythical, dim, prehistoric epoch of humanity, the
age of old Persia. This, and what still remained of the
knowledge of the ancient Egyptian epoch, preceded what
“actual history” related, which began only with
Hellenism. This Hellenism, to a certain extent, formed the
foundation of the culture of this age. All those who wished
to look more deeply into human life started with Hellenism;
and within Hellenism appeared all that Homer, the Greek
tragedians, and all the Greek writers have written concerning
the primeval history of this people and their work for
mankind.

Then one sees
how Greece began to decline, how it was stifled by Rome,
though only externally. Generally speaking, Rome overcame
Greece only politically, while in reality it adopted Greek
culture, Greek education and Greek life. It might be said
that politically the Romans conquered the Greeks, but
spiritually the Greeks conquered the Romans. During this
latter process, while Hellenism was conquering Rome
spiritually, it poured into Rome through hundreds and
hundreds of channels what it had itself acquired. From Rome
this streamed forth into all the other civilizations of the
world, while during this time Christianity streamed more and
more into the Greco-Roman civilization and was to a large
extent transformed when the northern Germanic peoples took
part in the spreading of the Greco-Roman Christian culture.
With this intermingling of Greece, Rome, and Christianity,
the second millennium of the world's history passed away,
which to the men of the eighteenth century was the first
Christian one. Then we see the beginning of the second
Christian millennium, the third historical civilization of
man. We see how everything goes on apparently in the same
way, although, if we have deeper insight, we shall see that
in this third millennium everything is really different. Two
figures only need be cited, a painter and a poet, who,
although they appear some two centuries after the end of the
millennium, nevertheless show how something essentially new
began for Western civilization with the second Christian
millennium, something which these two men carried further.
These two figures are Giotto and Dante.
[ Note 1 ]
Giotto as painter and Dante as poet represent the
beginning of all that followed, and what they gave was
embodied in later Western cultures. Those were the three
thousand years that could at that time be surveyed.

Then came the
nineteenth century. Only someone who can look more deeply
into the whole formation of the culture of the age is able
now to perceive all that took place in the nineteenth
century, and how for that reason everything had to become
different. It is all contained in the minds and souls of men,
but only a very few can as yet understand it.

The
perspective of the man of the eighteenth century went back
only to Hellenism; the age before that was somewhat nebulous.
What happened in the nineteenth century — and this is
little appreciated or understood today — is that the
East played its part in the culture of the West, indeed very
intensely so. This intervention of the Oriental influence in
its own peculiar way is what we must bear in mind when
considering the transformation that took place in the
civilization of the nineteenth century. This penetration by
the Orient threw light and shade upon everything that poured
into the culture and will increasingly do so. For this reason
a new understanding was required concerning things that up to
that time humanity had regarded in a different light.

If we wish to
choose single figures and individuals who have influenced the
culture of the West, in whom we could find nearly everything
that a man felt in his soul at the beginning of the
nineteenth century if he concerned himself with spiritual
life, we may mention
David, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe,
[ Note 2 ]
who was just beginning to
penetrate into life. Future historians writing of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be very clear about
one thing, that the intellectual and spiritual life of that
era was determined by these five figures. There lived then,
more than anyone can imagine now, even in the most delicate
stirrings of the soul, what we may call the feelings and
truths of the Psalms. There lived also fundamentally what is
to be found in Homer as well as what took such magnificent
form in Dante; then, even if it did not live in Shakespeare
himself, there was what is nevertheless so beautifully
expressed by him in the form in which it now lives in men of
modern times. Added to this is the striving of the human soul
after truth which Goethe expressed in Faust, something that
in reality lived in every human soul in such a way that it
was often said, “Every man who seeks the truth has
something of the Faust nature in him.”

To all this
there was added a quite new perspective, which extended beyond
the three thousand years covered by these five persons. It
came in ways that are at first quite unfathomable by external
history. This was the first entry of an inner Orient into the
mental and spiritual life of Europe. It was not only that to
the poems of those writers mentioned earlier was added what
was given in the Vedas and the
Bhagavad Gita,
nor the fact
that by learning to know these Eastern poems a different
emotional nuance about the world was aroused, differing
fundamentally from that of the Psalms or from what is to be
found in the poetry of Dante or Homer, but something appeared
in a mysterious manner which became ever more visible during
the nineteenth century. One name alone will suffice, a name
which made a great stir in the middle of the nineteenth
century, and this will convince us that something came from
the East to Europe along mysterious paths. We need but
mention the name of Schopenhauer.
[ Note 3 ]
In Schopenhauer what is
it that strikes you most of all, if you leave aside the
theoretical elements of his system? Isn't it the content of
feeling and sentiment that pervades his whole thought? In the
profound relationship between this nineteenth century man and
the Oriental-Aryan mode of thought and feeling, in every
sentence we might say, in the emphasis of feeling in
Schopenhauer, lives that which we might call the Eastern
element in the West; and this passed on to Eduard von Hartmann
[ Note 3 ]
in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This
penetrated along mysterious paths, as we have just said. We
gradually come to better understand these mysterious paths
when we see that in the course of the developments of the
nineteenth century a complete transformation, a metamorphosis
of all human thinking and feeling took place — not
however in only one part of the earth but in the intellectual
and spiritual life of the whole earth. As to what took place
in the West, if anyone would take the trouble, it would be
enough to compare anything written about religion,
philosophy, or any aspect of spiritual life with something
that belongs to the eighteenth century. He will then see that
a complete transformation took place, that all the questions
regarding the highest riddles asked by mankind had become
more vague, that men were striving to formulate new
questions, to look for new sentiments and modes of
perception, that nothing belonging to religion and what it
formerly gave to man could still be given through it to the
human soul in the same way. Everywhere there was a longing
for something deeper and more profoundly hidden in the depths
of religion.

This was not
true of Europe alone. It is characteristic of the beginning
of the nineteenth century that all over the civilized world
men, through an inner urge, were compelled to think
differently. If we wish to form a more exact conception of
what we are discussing, we must see that there was a general
convergence of the peoples and their folk cultures and folk
beliefs, with the result that people belonging to entirely
different creeds began in the nineteenth century to
understand each other in a quite remarkable way. We shall
quote a characteristic example which lies at the heart of
what we are trying to indicate. In the thirtieth year of the
nineteenth century, a man appeared in England who was a
Brahmin, an adherent of what he considered to be true
Brahminism, that is, the Vedanta teaching. Ram Mohun Roy
[ Note 4 ],
who died in London in
1836, exercised a great influence on those of his
contemporaries who were interested in such things, and made a
great impression. The remarkable thing about him was that on
the one hand he stood there as a reformer of Hinduism, though
a misunderstood one, while on the other hand everything he
said could be understood by all Europeans who were familiar
with the advanced thought of their age. He did not put forth
ideas that could be understood only through orientalism, but
ideas that could be understood by ordinary human reason.

What was Ram
Mohun Roy's attitude? He said something along these lines,
“I live in the midst of Hinduism, where a number of
different gods are worshipped. If the people of my country
are asked why they worship these gods, they say, ‘it is
our custom, we know nothing else. It was done by our fathers
and their fathers before them.’ And because the people
were influenced in this way,” Ram Mohun Roy continued,
“the crassest idolatry became the rule, an appalling
idolatry which disgraces the original greatness of the
religion of my fatherland. There once was a belief that,
although partly contradictory, is to be found in the Vedas.
It is the purest form of human thought, and it was brought
into the Vedanta system by Viasa.”

This was the
belief professed by Ram Mohun Roy. For this reason he had not
only made translations from various incomprehensible idioms
into the languages that are understandable in India, but he
also made extracts of what he considered the correct teaching
and spread them among the people. What was his intention when
he did this? He thought he recognized behind all that comes
to expression in the various gods and all that is worshipped
in the different idols a pure teaching of a primal divine
unity, the spiritual God who lives in all things but can no
longer be recognized in the idols. This God must once more
penetrate into the minds of men. When this Indian Brahmin
spoke in detail about what he believed to be the correct
Vedanta teaching, the true Indian creed, it did not sound
strange. To those who understood him rightly, it was as
though he preached a kind of rational belief that can be
attained by everyone who by using his rational mind turns to
the universal unitary God. And Ram Mohun Roy had followers:
Rabindranath Tagore and others
[ Note 4 ].
One of these followers, and this is especially interesting,
gave a lecture in 1870 about Christ and Christianity. It was
indeed extraordinarily interesting to hear an Indian speak
about Christ and Christianity. The actual mystery of
Christianity was quite remote from the Indian speaker —
he did not touch upon that at all. From the whole course of
the lecture we can see that he is quite unable to grasp the
fundamental fact that Christianity does not proceed from a
personal teacher but is founded on the Mystery of Golgotha, a
world historical fact, on death and resurrection. But that
which he can grasp and is so clear to him is that in Christ
Jesus we have a figure of tremendous significance, one that
is of importance to every human heart, a figure that must
stand there as the ideal figure for the whole history of the
world. It is remarkable to hear this Indian speaking about
Christ and to hear him say, “If a man goes deeply into
Christianity, he will see that Christianity must, even in the
West, go through a further evolution, for what the European
brings to my fatherland as Christianity does not appear to me
to be the true Christianity.”

We see from
the examples quoted that it was not only in Europe that
people's minds began to look behind the religious creeds, but
also in distant India. It is true also of many parts of the
earth where minds began to awake, and men approached in a new
way and from an entirely new point of view something they had
possessed for thousands of years. This metamorphosis of souls
in the nineteenth century will be fully perceptible only in
the course of time. Only in later times will history
recognize that impulses of this kind, although apparently
affecting only a few people, streamed through thousands of
channels into our hearts and souls, so that today all those
who participate in any way in spiritual life have them within
their souls. This had to result in a total renewal. All older
questions were transformed, and a new kind of understanding
came into being in relation to all views that had hitherto
been held. So it is that in the world, even today such
questions are already taking on a greater profundity. What
our spiritual movement desires today is the answering of
these questions.

This
spiritual movement is convinced that these questions cannot
in their present form be answered by the old traditions, by
modern natural science, or by that conception of the world
which reckons only with the factors of modern natural
science. Spiritual science, research into the spiritual
worlds, is necessary. In other words, mankind today, in
accordance with the whole trend of his evolution, must ask
questions that can be answered only through super-sensible
investigation. Quite slowly and gradually there have emerged
from the spiritual life of the West things that are once more
in harmony with the most beautiful traditions that have come
over from the East. You know that we have always stressed the
fact that the law of reincarnation comes out of Western
spiritual life itself, and that it need no more be taken as
something historical coming from Buddhism than for example
Pythagorean doctrine needs to be taken over from historical
traditions. This has always been emphasized, but the fact
that the idea of reincarnation arose in modern souls formed a
bridge which extended across the three thousand years of
which we have been speaking (during which the doctrine of
reincarnation was not the center of thinking) to the figure
of Buddha. The horizon, the perspective of the evolution of
mankind, was extended beyond the three thousand years. This
gave rise to new questions, which can be answered only
through spiritual science.

Let us begin
with the question to which the beginning of this Gospel of
Saint Mark gives rise, this Gospel which begins with the
words, “the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ.” Let us remember that these introductory words
are immediately followed not only by a characterization of a
passage of the old prophets but by the announcement of Christ
by John the Baptist. This proclamation was stated by him in
such a way that it may be comprised in these words:
“The time is fulfilled; the kingdom of the divine is
extending over the whole earth-existence.” What does
all this mean?

Let us
endeavor with the light that modern spiritual science can
give us to view retrospectively those past ages in the center
of which is contained “the fulfillment.” Let us
try to understand what it means that “an old era is
completed and a new one is beginning.” We shall best be
able to understand this if we first turn our attention to
something belonging to more remote times and then consider
something belonging to the modern era; between the two lies
the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us take something before the
Mystery of Golgotha and then something later, and then
endeavor to enter deeply into the difference between the two
epochs, so that we may recognize how far the old epoch had
been completed and a new one begun. In this way we shall not
enter into abstractions or definitions, but consider the
concrete.

I should like
you to turn your attention to the first millennium of human
evolution, as it was thought to be in earlier times. There in
the remotest period of this first millennium stands the
towering figure of Homer, the Greek poet and singer. Hardly
more than the name remains to mankind of him to whom are
ascribed those two great poems which are among the greatest
accomplishment of mankind: the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Scarcely more than his name is known, and in the nineteenth
century doubts were cast even on that — but we need not
dwell any further on that now. The more we know of the figure
of Homer, the more we admire him. For a person who studies
such things, the characters created by Homer whom we meet in
the Iliad and the Odyssey seem more alive than all the purely
political figures of Greece. Many different people who have
studied Homer over and over again have said that because of
the precision of his descriptions and his manner of
presentation he must have been a doctor. Others say he must
have been an artist, a sculptor, or a craftsman. Napoleon
admired the way Homer described tactics and strategy; still
others think he must have been a beggar wandering through the
land.

However all
this may be, it certainly does demonstrate the unique
individuality of Homer. Consider one of his characters,
Hector. If you have any time available, you ought to study
the figure of Hector in the Iliad — how plastically he
is described so that he stands as a complete personality
before us; how we see his affection for his paternal city,
Troy, his wife Andromache, his relationship to Achilles, and
to his armies; and how he commanded them. Try to call up this
man before your minds, this man who possessed all the
tenderness of a husband, and who clung in the ancient way to
his home city of Troy, and who suffered such disillusions as
only really great men can. Remember his relation with
Achilles. Hector, as presented by Homer, is a towering figure
from very ancient times, a man of great all-embracing
humanity, for of course what Homer is describing belongs to a
period well before his own, in the darkness of the past.
Hector stands out above all the others, all those figures who
seem mythical enough in the eyes of modern men.

Now take this
one figure. Skeptics and all kinds of philologists may indeed
doubt that there ever was a Hector at all, in the same way as
they doubt the existence of Homer. But anyone who takes into
consideration what may be understood from a purely human
viewpoint will be convinced that Homer describes only facts
that actually occurred. Hector was a living person who strode
through Troy, and Achilles and the other figures were equally
real. They still stand before us as personages of real
earthly life. We look back to them as people of a different
kind from ourselves, who are difficult to understand but whom
the poet is able to bring before our souls in every detail.
Now let us place before our souls a figure such as Hector,
one of the chief Trojan commanders, who is defeated by
Achilles. In such a personage we have something that belongs
to the old pre-Christian age, something by which we can
measure what men were before the time when Christ lived on
earth.

I will now draw your
attention to another figure, a remarkable figure of the fifth century
B.C.:
the great philosopher Empedocles
[ Note 5 ],
who spent a large part of
his life in Sicily. It was he who was the first to speak of
the four elements, fire, water, air, and earth, and who said
that everything that happens in the material realm caused by
the mingling and disintegration of these four elements
results from the principles of love and hate ruling in them.
It was he also who by his activity influenced Sicily by
calling into being important political institutions, and he
went about trying to lead the people into a life of
spirituality. When we look back to Empedocles we find that he
lived an adventurous as well as a deeply spiritual life.
Perhaps the truth of what I am about to say will be doubted
by some, but spiritual science knows that Empedocles went
about in Sicily not only as a statesman, but as a magician
and initiate, just as Hector, as depicted by Homer, walked in
Troy. In order to characterize the remarkable attitude of
Empedocles toward the world the fact confronts us — and
it is true and no invention — that in order, as it
were, to unite himself with all existence around him, he
ended by throwing himself into Mount Etna and was consumed by
its fire. In this way a second figure of the pre-Christian
age is presented to our souls.

Now let us
consider such figures as these in accordance with the methods
of spiritual science. First of all we know that these
individualities will appear again; we know that such souls
will return to life. We shall not pay any attention to their
intermediate incarnations but look for them in the
post-Christian era. We then see something of the change
brought about by time, something that can help us to
understand how the Mystery of Golgotha intervened in human
evolution. If we say that such figures as Hector and
Empedocles appeared again, we must ask how they walked among
men in the post-Christian era. For we shall then see how the
intervention of the Mystery of Golgotha, the fulfillment and
beginning of a new age, worked on their souls. As serious
anthroposophists assembled here together we need not shrink
from the communications of true spiritual science, which can
be confirmed by external facts.

I should now
like to turn your attention to something that took place in
the post-Christian era, and perhaps again it may be said that
the person concerned was a poetical personage. But this
poetical personage can be traced back to a real individuality
who was once alive. I direct your attention to the character
created by Shakespeare in his Hamlet. Anyone who knows the
development of Shakespeare, insofar as it can be known
externally, and especially someone who is acquainted with it
through spiritual science, will know that Shakespeare's
Hamlet is none other than the transformed real prince of
Denmark, who also lived at one time. I cannot go into
everything underlying the historical prototype of the
poetical figure of Hamlet, but through the research of
spiritual science, I can offer you a striking example of how
a man, a spirit of ancient times, reappears in the
post-Christian era. The real figure underlying Hamlet, as
presented by Shakespeare, is Hector. The same soul that lived
in Hamlet lived in Hector. It is just by such a
characteristic example as this, and the striking way the two
different souls manifest themselves, that we can interpret
what happened in the intervening time. A personality such as
that of Hector stands before us in the pre-Christian age.
Then comes the intervention of the Mystery of Golgotha in
human evolution, and the spark it kindled in Hector's soul
causes a figure, a prototype of Hamlet, to arise, of whom
Goethe said, “This is a soul that is unable to deal
with any situation and is not equal to its position, who is
assigned tasks but is unable to fulfill them.” We may
ask why Shakespeare expressed it in this way. He did not
know. But anyone who can investigate the connections through
spiritual science knows that behind these things forces were
at work. The poet creates in the unconscious; before him
stands, so to speak, first the figure which he creates, and
then, as in a tableau of which he himself knows nothing, the
whole individuality with which the figure is connected. Why
does Shakespeare choose particular qualities in Hamlet and
sharply emphasize them, qualities that perhaps Hamlet's own
contemporaries would not have noticed? Because he observes
them against the background of the era. He feels how
different a soul has become in its transition from the old
life to the new. Hamlet, the doubter, the skeptic, who has
lost the ability to cope with the situations with which he
meets in life, the procrastinator and waverer, this is what
Hector, once so sure of himself, has become.

Let me direct
your attention to another figure of modern times, who was
also first presented to mankind in a poetic picture, in a
poem whose protagonist will certainly live on in humanity for
a long time to come when for posterity the poet, like Homer
or Shakespeare, no longer is in existence. About Homer we
know nothing at all, and about Shakespeare we know very
little indeed. What the various compilers of notes and
biographers of Goethe have written will long since have been
forgotten. In spite of the printing press and other modern
inventions, what interests people in Goethe at the present
time will likewise have been long forgotten. But large as
life, and modelled from life, there will stand the figure of
Faust which Goethe has created. Just as men today know
nothing of Homer, so will they some day know but little of
Goethe (which will be a good thing); but they will know much
about Faust. Faust again is a figure who, as he is presented
to us in a literary form by Goethe, can be recognized as one
brought to a certain conclusion by Goethe. The poetical
picture refers back to a real sixteenth century figure who
lived then as a real person, though he was not as Goethe
described him in his Faust. Why then did Goethe describe him
in this way? Goethe himself did not know. But when he
directed his attention to the traditional Faust that had been
handed down to him, a Faust with whom he was already
acquainted through the marionettes of his boyhood, then the
forces that stood behind Faust, the forces of his previous
incarnation, the forces of Empedocles, the old Greek
philosopher, worked within him! All these radiated into the
figure of Faust. So we might say, since Empedocles threw
himself into Etna and united himself with the fire-element of
the earth, what a wonderful spiritualization of pre-Christian
nature mysticism was accomplished in fact in the final
tableau of Goethe's Faust, when Faust ascends into the fire-
element of heaven through Pater Seraphicus and the rest.
Slowly and gradually a totally new spiritual tendency entered
into the deeper strivings of men. Already some time ago it
began to become evident to the more profound spirits of
mankind that, without their knowing anything about
reincarnation or karma, when they were considering a great
comprehensive soul whom they wished to describe from the
depths of their inner life, they found themselves describing
what radiated over from earlier incarnations. Although
Shakespeare did not know that Hamlet was Hector, he
nevertheless described him as such, without being aware that
the same soul had lived in both of them. So too Goethe
portrays his Faust as though Empedocles with all his
peculiarities were standing behind him, because in his Faust
there lived the soul of Empedocles. It is characteristic that
the progress of the human soul should proceed in this
way.

I have
mentioned two characteristic figures, in both of whom we can
perceive that when great men of earlier times reappear in a
modern post-Christian age, they are shaken to the very depths
of their souls and can only with difficulty adjust themselves
to life. Everything that was within them in the past is still
within them. For example, when we allow Hamlet to work upon
us, we feel that the whole force of Hector is in him. But we
feel that this force cannot come forth in the post-Christian
era, that it then meets with obstacles, that something now
works upon the soul that is the beginning of something new,
whereas in the figures of antiquity something was coming to
an end. So do these figures stand plastically delineated
before us; both Hector and Empedocles represent a conclusion.
But what is working on further in mankind must find new paths
into new incarnations. This is revealed with Hector in Hamlet
and also with Empedocles in Faust, who had within him all the
abysmal urges toward the depths of nature. Because he had
within him the whole nature of Empedocles, he could say,
“I will lay aside the Bible for a time and study nature
and medicine. I will no longer be a theologian.” He
felt the need to have dealings with demonic beings who made
him roam through the world leaving him marveling but
uncomprehending. Here the Empedocles element had an
after-effect but was not able to adjust itself to what a man
must be after the new age had begun.

I wanted to
show you through these explanations how in well-known souls,
about whom anyone can find information, a powerful
transformation shows itself, and how the more deeply we study
them the more perceptible this becomes. If we inquire what
happened between the two incarnations of such
individualities, the answer always is the Mystery of
Golgotha, which was announced by the Baptist when he said,
“The time is fulfilled, the kingdoms of the spirit, or
the kingdoms of heaven, are passing over into the kingdom of
man.” Yes, the kingdoms of heaven did indeed powerfully
seize the human kingdom, but those who take this in an
external sense are unable to understand it. They seized it so
powerfully that the great men of antiquity, who had been in
themselves so solid and compact, had to make a new beginning
in human evolution on earth. This new beginning showed itself
precisely with them, and lasted until the end of the old
epoch, with the Mystery of Golgotha. At that time something
that had been fulfilled ebbed away, something which had
presented men in such a way that they appeared as rounded
personalities in themselves. Then came something that made it
necessary for these souls to make a new beginning. Everything
had to be transformed and altered so that great souls
appeared small. They had to be transformed into the stage of
childhood, for something quite new was beginning. We must
inscribe this in our souls if we wish to understand what is
meant at the beginning of the Gospel of St. Mark by the words
“a beginning.” Yes, truly a beginning, a
beginning that shakes the inmost soul to its foundations and
brings a totally new impulse into human evolution, a
“beginning of the Gospel.”

What then is
the Gospel? It is something that comes down to us from the
kingdoms we have often described, where dwell the higher
hierarchical beings, among whom are the angels and
archangels. It descends through the world that rises above
the human world. So do we gain an inkling of the deeper
meaning of the word Gospel. It is an impulse that descends
through the realms of the archangels and angels; it comes
down from these kingdoms and enters into mankind. None of the
abstract translations really covers the matter adequately. In
reality the word Gospel should indicate that at a certain
time something begins to flow in upon the earth which
formerly flowed only where there dwell the angels and
archangels. Something descended to earth that shook the souls
of men and shook the strongest souls most. It is here noted
that this was the beginning, and the beginning has a
continuation. The beginning was made at that time, and we
shall see that fundamentally the whole development of
humanity since then is a continuation of that beginning when
the impulse began to flow down from the kingdom of the
angeloi, or what we call the “ev-angel”
or Gospel.

We cannot
seek or investigate deeply enough if we wish to characterize
the different Gospels. We shall see that especially the
Gospel of St. Mark can be understood only if we understand in
the right way the evolution of humanity with all its impulses
and all that has happened in the course of it. I do not wish
to describe this externally, but to characterize actual
souls, showing how it is only the recognition of the fact of
reincarnation, when it becomes a matter of real research,
that can bear witness to the progress of such souls as those
of Hector and Empedocles. Only in this way can the deeper
significance of the Christ Impulse be brought before our
souls. Otherwise we may discover beautiful things, but they
will all be superficial. What lies behind all the outer
events in the history of the Christ Impulse is discovered
only when we can throw light upon life through spiritual
research, so that we can recognize how a single life passes
not only in its separate phases but also in the sequence of
incarnations. We must look upon reincarnation as a serious
matter and apply it to history in such a way that it becomes
an element that gives life to it. We shall then perceive the
working of the Event of Golgotha, the greatest of all
impulses. It is especially in souls that this impulse, which
we have described often enough, will become visible.